Insyde Shares His Inspiring Story from Music to TikTok & Esports

Insyde

Many teens dream of making music that will blow into virality online, yet it is often a dream, and almost never comes to fruition. Not so with former Chick-Fil-A employee turned internet celebrity, musician, and entrepreneur Insyde. He wrote and recorded a song and posted it to his SoundCloud account as a social experiment, opening the door for his rise to social media fame. Since then he has moved into posting viral TikTok videos, and he has become a manager for esports organization Azuric. ONE37pm got the opportunity to hear Insyde's story in his own words:

I have always been interested in creating, even when I was quite young. From age 10 to around age 15, I was borrowing books from the library about filmmaking, graphic design, web development, and marketing. It didn't matter that I only understood half of these books at the time. If I did not understand something, I would research until I figured it out. Most people view autism as a crutch, but I viewed it as a tool, it gave me attention to detail and kept me laser focused on the things I really was interested in—like marketing.

Like many people, I always had a feeling that I wanted to be famous. One day I decided to try an experiment just to see how viral I could go online with just the marketing skills I had learned online and from books I got from my local library. I had been listening to a lot of free youtube beats at the time, and I had one that I liked, so I just put it into a free recording app, and used the worst microphone ever and recorded a song. It took me roughly an hour total to record the song, then I posted it on SoundCloud, pitched it to some big repost accounts, and let it sit. I had a summer camp for a week the next day, so I went to that and never thought twice about it.

- Insyde

Boy, was I in for a surprise when I got home and saw that I had over 300,000 streams in a week, and saw that my song was near the top of the weekly SoundCloud charts. I immediately got to work and got it released on all the major streaming platforms, such as Spotify and Apple Music. I even got a quick music video together and uploaded it on YouTube. I made sure all my social media accounts—like my Twitter account and my Instagram account—were branded the same and all linked on my SoundCloud profile. Being a digital marketing enthusiast, I employed various marketing strategies I had learned from online guides and the books I had acquired from the local library. Even then I could not predict the virality of the project; I never thought it would blow up to over 1 million streams in just a month, which is incredible even for many mainstream artists on SoundCloud. Don’t get me wrong, I had confidence. I knew it would work, but I was not prepared for the extent at which it would do so.

In early 2020, I decided to try my hand at other social media platforms, so I started focusing on creating content for the short-form video platform TikTok. My marketing experience—along with the attention to detail that came with my autism—led me to quickly figure out the TikTok algorithm, and I almost immediately had multiple videos go viral, totaling over 120 million views combined in a 3 month period. I remember when I hit 500,000 followers on Tiktok, which I celebrated in a Twitter post on April 10, 2021.